Wells that lack the formation pressure to produce to a surface location have used an ESP to boost pressure sufficiently for that purpose. It is desirable to exclude debris from the suction of the ESP and various schemes attached to the suction of the ESP have been proposed in the past. Some examples of such designs are U.S. Pat. No. 7,703,508 where an intake screen has a bypass feature if it clogs with debris and U.S. Pat. No. 7,503,389 FIG. 8 showing concentric screens supported by the suction connection on the ESP. U.S. Pat. No. 6,216,788 shows using a sand separator that includes a hydrocyclone and a bypass line with an intention of using pump pressure to get the captured sand or debris to the surface. Modular porous suction filters supported by the ESP are shown in US 2015/0064034. Suction filtering is mentioned in passing for an ESP in U.S. Pat. No. 9,097,094. A seabed mounted ESP and inlet screen is described in U.S. Pat. No. 8,961,153.
A known debris removal and retention device made by Baker Hughes Incorporated and known in the industry as a VACS tool is shown in FIG. 1 of U.S. Pat. No. 7,472,745. This tool typically uses an eductor powered by pumped flow from a surface location to draw debris laden fluid into an intake pipe whereupon the debris is deflected into a surrounding annular debris retention space and the fluid stream continues up the tool through a screen and is drawn by the eductor to outside the tool housing whereupon some flow recycles back down the hole and the rest flows uphole.
The currently available ESPs have limits to the weight they can support not only for the weight of the filtration equipment but also the added weight of the captured debris. Some designs have resorted to simply dumping captured debris into the rat hole but this is merely a stopgap solution still limited by the limited weight that can be supported directly from the ESP. The present invention supports a debris removal assembly from a retrievable packer or anchor or other support in the borehole that can be sealed to the borehole wall to allow heavier structures that can capture debris so that the captured debris can be removed from the borehole when the packer is retrieved. A modular design for the debris removal assembly allows selection of the needed volume for debris retention for the anticipated debris load. The ESP provides the motive force to draw fluid into the debris removal assembly which has aspects of the VACS tool but does not use the jet bushing of the VACS tool since the application is on a pump suction as opposed to the eductor based VACS design of the past. These and other aspects of the present invention will be more readily apparent to those skilled in the art from a review of the description of the preferred embodiment and the associated drawings while recognizing that the full scope of the invention is to be determined by the appended claims.